Monday 6 March 2017

Academy borrowing - 1 year delay on publication

The Education Funding Agency has said it will delay publication of figures showing how much money academy schools have borrowed to improve their buildings. Last year the EFA said it would publish figures in June 2016.

A spokesperson for the EFA said: 'I have now checked with the funding team who deal with processing the CIF bids to ascertain whether the information on loans for CIF work has been published. Unfortunately, the publication data has not yet been finalised and the information is now not due to be published until the summer of 2017.'

Last year the EFA said that 255 academies had applied for CIF loans for the 2015/16 funding round. Since then grants and loans have been agreed for 2016/17 and successful bids for 2017/18 grant funding (which is done alongside bids for loans) - are due to be published in April. 

The grants and loans are available to standalone academies and MATs with five or fewer academies.

Back in 2015 accountants at Kreston Reeves said loan financing will "put pressure on the academy's core funding as the repayments will almost certainly be met out of GAG income and, as Lord Nash said, this funding will be flat. Consequently, there will be less money available to spend on academies' educational purposes."

In a recent report the IFS said: 'Spending per pupil is expected to fall by 6.5% in real terms between 2015–16 and 2019–20.'

In its 2015 report Kreston Reeves said: 'The ability of academies to borrow, albeit only from EFA and Salix Finance (for heating systems), is a significant change of direction, and not one that has received any significant press attention. It will be interesting to see if this is a precursor to academies being able to borrow from banks in the future.'

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